(2023-07-15, 10:35 PM)quirkybrainmeat Wrote: About studies trying to uphold epiphenomenalism, did anyone read the paper: "Chasing the Rainbow: The non-conscious nature of being" ?
A few excerpts from the introduction of this paper:
Quote:(In our view,) the experience of consciousness is a passive accompaniment to the non-conscious processes of internal broadcasting and the creation of the personal narrative. In this sense, personal awareness is analogous to the rainbow which accompanies physical processes in the atmosphere but exerts no influence over them.
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....while two events can be temporally and spatially contiguous, we argue that personal awareness is qualitatively distinct and separate and as such does not exert any causal influence over the contents of the personal narrative (Halligan and Oakley, 2000; Blackmore, 2012, 2016). In other words, despite its intuitive attractiveness and folk acceptance, the ascription of executive functions or agency to “consciousness” either in part or as a whole, or to the “experience of consciousness,” we claim is a misconception.
Consequently, the focus of this paper is less concerned with explaining personal awareness, which we take as a given, but more with explaining the properties, functions, and adaptive significance of the non-consciously generated, self-referential psychological content of the personal narrative.
It's apparent that this is just another flavor of epiphenomenalism. The authors claim that what we consider conscious agency - the making of decisions and acting on them - is not part of consciousness, but is a bunch of unconscious cognitive mechanisms that they try to define and identify. And the to us self-evident cause and effect relationship involving choice or decision, action, experience of the result and of making the decision and of willing the action, is all just an illusion. The unconscious deterministic "personal narrative" process they say is constantly going on in the brain neurons somehow influences the conscious mind, in such a way that it seems to the conscious mind to be part of itself.
Though they admit conscious awareness is real, according to them it is totally ineffectual and has no power of agency. They don't even attempt to understand subjective awareness - just proclaim it totally ineffectual. Interestingly, they imagine that the conscious mind can't influence the unconscious personal narrative process, but at the same time the personal narrative process must be designed so that it constantly influences the conscious mind to think that the unconscious decisions and actions are its own will. We think we're the masters of our minds, but in reality we are its slaves. I can't tell yet if they identify this essential design requirement.
There couldn't be any sort of evolution of instinctual behavior by any sort of adaptive natural selection process, since there would be no feedback from experientially "bad" or "good" results of certain actions. The conscious perception of "badness" or "goodness", pain or pleasure, would be completely ineffectual.
This theory also has all the flaws already identified in this thread and others, both philosophical and evidential. For instance, argument #1 at
https://psiencequest.net/forums/thread-m...4#pid53654 .
The dictionary definition of "narrative": an account, report, or story, as of events, experiences, etc. the narrative is the part of a literary work that relates events.
"Account"- this is defined as an oral or written description of particular events or situations.
"Story" - dictionary definition: a narrative, either true or fictitious, in prose or verse, designed to interest, amuse, or instruct the hearer or reader.
"Report" - dictionary definition: an account or statement describing in detail an event, situation, or the like, usually as the result of observation, inquiry, etc.
Worst of all for this theory, as can be seen, and as Sci just pointed out, a "narrative" is inextricably bound up with conscious awareness. By using the term "narrative" to refer to what they are claiming to be an unconscious cognitive process, the authors are completely incoherent.
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